Jointly Optimal Utility Distortion-Robustness and

Lifetime Tradeoff for Multimedia Networks

A. Dilawari* and Muhammad Tahir*
*Department of Electrical Engineering
Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science
University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Pakistan
arfa.dilawari@kics.edu.pk, mtahir@uet.edu.pk
AbstractUsage of wireless portable handheld devices has seen
tremendous growth and the trend is expected to continue due to
an increasing activity on social networks. A large percentage of
communication activity on these devices involve either sharing
or downloading of multimedia content. These devices require
efcient usage of both bandwidth as well as battery and yet do
not compromise the quality of multimedia content. To achieve this
goal we have proposed a multi-objective cross-layer optimization
framework, which not only achieves optimal network lifetime and
utility but also provides optimal video quality. We introduce the
notion of distortion margin to achieve a certain level of perfor-
mance robustness that can be exchanged with other performance
parameters including lifetime and bandwidth utilization. The ap-
propriate choice of the objective function, required to implement
distortion margin, is obtained by applying sensitivity analysis. A
distributed implementation is presented that achieves an optimal
performance tradeoff among the contending objectives as veried
by the performance evaluation results.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless multimedia communication by portable devices is
experiencing dramatic growth. Almost every handheld device
has the ability to connect to the multitude of wireless access
technologies and brings endless possibilities for information
exchange. An important aspect of such devices is their ca-
pability to autonomously congure peer-to-peer multi-hop
connections. In addition, the communication link can also be
established with the base station, providing an opportunity to
have an access to the desired resource from multiple sources
through multiple paths. Ensuring feasibility of above men-
tioned applications, it is imperative to use available resources
effectively because these devices being battery powered have
the inherent requirement of network lifetime maximization.
In literature, tradeoff between network lifetime and end to
end distortion is widely explored, where distortion is related
to minimum rate requirement in the form of a rate-distortion
function. The authors in [1] have proposed an approach for en-
ergy minimization by exploring its tradeoff with video encod-
ing. In [2], ow control optimization with lifetime constraint is
considered. In another related work, performance optimization
for wireless video networks to achieve resource allocation
along with network lifetime maximization is considered in
[3]. The authors in [4], have proposed power minimized rate
allocation scheme (PMRAS) for multi-homed video scenario,
where the objective is to perform optimal rate allocation while
guaranteeing minimal total power consumption. The solution
in [4] effectively achieves an optimal tradeoff between lifetime
and video quality.
The problem of video quality and resource optimization is
considered separately in literature. Video quality as well as
trafc performance optimization for multi-rate video trafc
is discussed in [5]. The objective in [5] is to achieve the
optimal rate-distortion tradeoff by incorporating the inter-
layer dependencies among network layers as constraints. In
[6], a framework for joint source/channel rate adaptation is
proposed, where video encoding rate and link rate are jointly
considered. The proposed solutions in [5] and [6] can achieve
optimal video quality and resource allocation tradeoff but
fall short in maximizing the network lifetime. On the other
hand the solutions providing lifetime maximization along with
video quality do not achieve optimal resource allocation. It is
therefore desirable to develop an appropriate framework to
achieve optimal tradeoff among network utility, lifetime and
distortion.
To address the above mentioned limitations of existing
solutions, we have proposed a multi-objective distributed
optimization framework, which allows optimal video quality
tradeoff with network lifetime while maximizing resource uti-
lization. To achieve this we introduce the notion of distortion-
robustness, which is the gap between optimal distortion and the
maximum permissible distortion threshold. This is achieved
by incorporating distortion-robustness parameter in the
distortion constraints and provides the exibility to achieve an
desired level of performance tradeoff. For a given network life-
time objective, we have used sensitivity analysis to dene an
optimal objective function for distortion-robustness. The pro-
posed unied framework achieves an optimal tradeoff among
the contending objectives of utility, distortion-robustness and
network lifetime.
II. NETWORK MODEL
We consider a network modeled as directed graph G =
(N, L) where N is the set of nodes and L is the set of links.
Let each source node s N has an associated set (s) of
multiple disjoint paths to the destination node. Once multiple
paths are calculated using the link-disjoint method, a threshold
value is specied to determine the selection of the appropriate
paths. Each selected path p associated with source node s is
composed of a set of links L(s, p), p (s).
2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications: Mobile and Wireless Networks
978-1-4577-1348-4/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE 2550
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Let SP(l), l L(s, p) denote the set of all source path
pairs associated with link l. No path p traverses the same link
or the same node more than once. We allow splitting of ow
from each source and let f
p
s
be the ow from source s using
path p. Now using ow conservation, the total ow originated
from source s can be obtained as f
s
=

p(s)
f
p
s
s. The
total trafc ow through any link is upper bounded by the
achievable rate r
l
on that link and can be written as

s:pSP(l)
f
p
s
r
l
l. (1)
Now the rate of information transfer through link l is upper
bounded using the following link capacity expression
r
l
W log
_
g
l
P
l
n
l
_
l. (2)
In (2), P
l
P is link transmit power and P is the power
vector. The fraction
g
l
P
l
n
l
in (2) is the link signal to noise
ratio and is denoted by SNR
l
. Validity of (2) requires
SNR
l
(P) 1, which is satised by almost all the narrow-
band wireless communication systems and in case of wide-
band communication, e.g. CDMA system, a large value of
spreading gain will fulll the requirement. For an arbitrary
sensor node n N, let (n) be the set of all active links
associated with n. Then the nodal power utilization, P
n
, can
be obtained from the individual link powers P
l
, l (n)
and is given by
P
n
=

l(n)
P
l
n (3)
Since the data transmissions dominantly contain multimedia
content, it is necessary to take into account the distortion due
to rate adaptations performed to achieve battery conservation
to improve network lifetime. We use the ITU-T H.263 video
compression standard and the distortion-rate (DR) model [7]
of the encoded video stream is dened as follows
d =

(

p(s)
f
p
s
f
min
)
f
s
, (4)
where d denotes the video distortion and the parameters
and f
min
depend on the coding scheme as well as video
content [7]. The distortion in (4) is upper bounded by D
th
(s)
to meet a certain minimum video quality required by the
application. Now in the presence of lifetime maximization
objective, it is quite intuitive to realize that the video distortion
most of the time will be operating at its threshold value
of D
th
(s). To this end we introduce distortion-robustness
parameter,
s
:
s
[0, 1), s for each end-to-end
ow, which can be used to achieve optimal tradeoff between
video quality performance and network lifetime. To realize
this optimal tradeoff, we incorporate the distortion-robustness
parameter
s
by modifying the distortion in (4) as

p(s)
f
p
s
f
min
)
(1
s
)D
th
(s) f
s
(5)
The parameter
s
is upper bounded to 1 ensuring that the
maximum distortion threshold can be made tight to achieve
the desired performance level. Various denitions of network
lifetime have been used for different scenarios. The network
lifetime is dened as the time when the rst node in the
network fails and is one of the most commonly used measure
[8]. This is a practical measure, since failure of a single node
can lead to decomposition of the original network into multiple
disjoint networks.
III. OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE TRADEOFF FRAMEWORK
To achieve the desired optimal utility, distortion-robustness
and lifetime tradeoff, we have formulated a multi-objective
constrained optimization problem as
maximize
_
min
_
1
P
n
_
+

s
((
s
) +U(f
s
))
_
(6)
s.t.

p(s)
f
p
s
f
min
(1
s
) D
th
(s) s (7)
P
n
=

l(n)
P
l
n,

p(s)
f
p
s
= f
s
, 0
s
1 s (8)
r
l
W log
_
g
l
P
l
n
l
_
,

s:pSP(l)
f
p
s
r
l
l (9)
In (6), (.) and U(.) are respectively, distortion-robustness
and utility objective functions and is weighting coefcient
to achieve the desired level of tradeoff. For distributed imple-
mentation we transform the problem to epigraph equivalent
form using slack variable t as follows,
maximize
_
(1 )t +

s
((
s
) +U(f
s
))
_
P
n
1/t n, constraints (7) (9) (10)
We augment the objective function by weighting the constraint
in (7) and P
n
1/t by Lagrange multipliers
n
and

s
, respectively, to obtain
L(t, f , P, , , ) = maximize {(1 )t+

s
((
s
) +U(f
s
)) +

n
(1/t P
n
)
+

s
_
D
th
(s)

(f
s
f
min
)
1
1
s
_
_
s.t. constraints (8) (9). (11)
The problem in (11) is decomposed into distortion-robustness,
lifetime and utility-power allocation subproblems as discussed
next.
A. Optimal Distortion-Robustness Subproblem
The distortion-robustness sub-problem from (11) is given
by
maximize

s
_
(
s
)

s
1
s
_
s.t. 0
s
< 1. (12)
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The objective function (
s
) in (12) modulates the distortion-
robustness to achieve the tradeoff with network lifetime. To
achieve this tradeoff optimally, an appropriate choice of the
objective function (
s
) is required. For this purpose, we x
= 0 in (6) and employ sensitivity analysis to analyze the
effect of distortion threshold, D
th
(s), perturbation on network
lifetime. Perturbing distortion constraint for s
th
ow by
s

we observe its effect on optimal network lifetime by solving
the following perturbed problem:

() = maximize (1 )t
s.t.

p(s)
f
p
s
f
min

s
D
th
(s) s
and constraint in (10). (13)
Choice of parameter
s
= 1 s, corresponds to unperturbed
problem, while
s
> 1 and 0 <
s
1, respectively,
represent either relaxing or tightening the distortion constraint.
Let

s
, corresponding to

( = 1), is optimal Lagrange

multiplier (or dual variable) associated with unperturbed dis-
tortion constraint. Then the fractional increment or decrement
in

( = 1) due to perturbing s
th
constraint is given by

()

(1)

(1)
=

(
s
e
s
)

(1)

(1)
,

()

(1)
= (
s
1)

(1)/
s

(1)
+o(
s
),
= (
s
1)(

s
/

(1)) +o(
s
)
(
s
1)

(1)
. (14)
In rst equality of (14), vector e
s
has only s
th
entry equal to
one. In (14), second equality follows from Taylor series and
o(
s
) denotes lumped higher order terms (including second
order). Third equality in (14) follows from the fact that

(1)/
s
=

s
[9] and the last expression of (14) is
rst order approximation. The optimal choice for distortion-
robustness objective function can be made by differentiating
the objective function in (12) with respect to
s
and then
setting it to zero results in
(
s
)

s=

s
=

s
(1
s
)
2
. (15)
Using (14), we substitute
s
with (1
s
) and based on the
fact that

s
= (1
s
)
2
(
s
)/
s
|
s=

s
, we obtain

()

(1)

s

(1)
=
s
(1
s
)
2
_

(0)
_
(
s
)

s=

s
(16)
where

(0) is obtained by mapping

(1) form
s
to
s
domain. Let
s
=

()

(1)

is the fractional amount of lifetime

that we can tradeoff for achieving distortion-robustness, then
using (16) we obtain

s
=
s
(1
s
)
2

(0)
(
s
)

s
. (17)
Now integrating (17) results in
(
s
) =

(0)

s
_
ln(

s
1
s
) +
1
1
s
_
. (18)
Based on (18), the resulting distortion-robustness sub-problem
is given by
maximize

s
_

(0)

s
_
ln(

s
1
s
) +
1
1
s
_
+

s
(1
s
)
_
s.t. 0
s
< 1, (19)
and can be solved for
s
using efcient algorithms [9].
B. Lifetime Maximization Subproblem
From the Lagrangian function in (11), we have the lifetime
maximization subproblem dened as
maximize (1 )t +

n
t
. (20)
The optimal solution to the above problem, as discussed in
[10], is obtained by differentiating the objective function in
(20) and equating to zero as
t

n
1
. (21)
Considering the practicality of the above expression, we ob-
serve that P
n
can not be arbitrarily large and is upper bounded
by P
(ub)
n
, due to the maximum power transmit capability of the
wireless transceiver used and is ensured by incorporating the
bound P
(ub)
n
1/t

. Combining this bound with the solution

in (21), we obtain
t

= min
_
1
P
(ub)
n
,

n
1
_
. (22)
C. Joint Power Allocation and Utility Subproblem
From the expression in (11), the joint nodal power and
utility optimization subproblem is dened as
maximize

s
_
U(f
s
) +
D
th
(s)
s

(f
s
f
min
)
_

n
P
n
s.t. constraints (8), (9). (23)
The optimization subproblem in (23) is a convex optimization
problem in variables f
s
and P
n
and can be solved efciently
using interior point algorithm [9].
D. Dual Problem
The dual problem associated with the Lagrangian in (11) is
dened as
minimize g(, )
s.t
n
,
s
0 n, s. (24)
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4
1
2
6
3 4
5
Fig. 1. Network model used for performance evaluation.
TABLE I
MULTIPLE FEASIBLE PATHS OF DUAL INTERFACE WIRELESS VISUAL
NETWORK.
Source-Dest. Flow(f
(s,p)
) Paths
1-4 f
(1,1)
, f
(1,2)
, f
(1,3)
1-3-4, 1-4, 1-2-4
2-4 f
(2,1)
, f
(2,2)
2-3-4, 2-4
6-4 f
(6,1)
, f
(6,2)
6-1-3-4, 6-3-2-4
In (24), g(, ) = L(t

, f

, P

, , ) and t

, f

, P

and

represent optimal primal variables and are obtained

as a solution to (11). Now the problem in (24) can be solved
using projection sub-gradient updates given by

n
(k + 1) = [
n
(k) +(k) (1/t P
n
)]
+
n, (25)

s
(k + 1) =
_

s
(k) +(k)
_
D
th
(s)

(f
s
f
min
)

1
1
s
__
+
s. (26)
The expression [x]
+
in (25) and (26) is dened as max{0, x}
and (t 1/P
n
) and
_
D
th
(s)

(f
s
f
min
)
1
1s
_
are the sub-
gradients. Variable step size rule dened as (k) = 1/

k
is used to update dual variables [11]. The utility, distortion-
robustness and lifetime subproblems as well as dual updates
are assigned to a set of different nodes resulting in distributed
implementation.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION RESULTS
For performance evaluation, a wireless network of six nodes
is considered as shown in Fig. 1, where every node is provided
with the equal source of energy. Given a source-destination
pair, all the possible disjoint paths are calculated based on
the link weights. Link weights are proportional to the line-
of-sight (LOS) distance between the corresponding devices.
From application perspective a threshold is chosen to select
the set of feasible paths. For simplicity, we have considered a
scenario where three source nodes (node 1, 2 and 6) exchange
information with the single destination (node 4). The system
is initialized by the trafc ows from source node 1, 2 and
6 set to 0.7Mbps, 0.5Mbps, and 0.4Mbps respectively, other
parametric values used in the performance evaluation are
tabulated in Table II.
Our main goal is to study the optimal tradeoff among net-
work utilization, lifetime and the distortion margin. Network
TABLE II
NETWORK PARAMETERS USED IN THE PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS.
Network Parameters Values
Maximum Transmission Power (Pmax) 200mW
Maximum Link Rate(Rmax) 54Mbps
Initial Trafc Flow of Source Node 2 0.5Mbps
Initial Trafc Flow of Source Node 6 0.4Mbps
Initial Trafc Flow of Source Node 1 0.7Mbps
Link Bandwidth 0.05MHz
Link Noise 0.08mW
lifetime is dened as
P
min thres
P
max
i
where P
min thres
refers to the
minimum nodal power required for transmission which is set
to 1mW and P
max
i
= max{P
1
, P
2
......P
n
} corresponds to the
node with maximum transmission power in the network. For
every possible end to end ow, a large number of combinations
of parametric values of
s
and D
th
(s) are possible. In order
to keep the complexity manageable and analyze the problem
effectively we have used D
th
(s) = D
th
and
s
= .
Fig. 2 shows optimal tradeoff between distortion robustness
and network lifetime as a function of D
th
and the weight co-
efcient . D
th
signies the maximum amount of distortion
that can be tolerated and effectively denes the distortion at
the encoded sequence. It is measured as the Mean-Squared-
Error (MSE) in dB. For a particular set value of , variation in
D
th
results in the adjustment of both distortion robustness as
well as lifetime thus providing optimal tradeoff. This is due to
the fact that for a given distortion threshold, the source node
adjusts the information ow rate providing the desired level of
distortion and the corresponding nodal power requirement is
also optimized. For instance, when the distortion threshold is
relaxed, the minimum transmission rate is adjusted resulting
in an increase in the distortion robustness and as a result
provides an increase in the network lifetime. It is interesting
to note that due to multi-path availability, the network allows
all nodes to optimally distribute the trafc along the selected
disjoint paths. The optimal solution avoids any congestion for
the links carrying multiple ows by diverting trafc to lightly
loaded paths, which further helps in reducing power consump-
tion and thus providing additional benet in extending network
lifetime. The effect of varying the weighting parameter can
also be seen from Fig. 2, which can be used to further improve
the network lifetime at the expense of reduced network utility.
To further emphasize the above discussion, Fig. 3 shows
the tradeoff between ow f
1
utilization and the distortion
robustness. In this case relaxing (increasing) the distortion
threshold D
th
, allows an increase in the robustness parameter
. If the change in the D
th
is not completely countered by
the corresponding change in , the resulting difference is
used to adjust the ow rate and as a consequence affects the
nodal power utilization. The resulting rate allocation provides
an optimal tradeoff between transmission ow and distortion
robustness. When weight co-efcient is increased, it cor-
responds to reducing the relative importance of lifetime for
achieving better distortion and network utility performance.
The result in Fig. 4 shows how the network utilization,
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5
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
Distortion Robustness 1
N
o
r
m
a
l
i
z
e
d
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
L
i
f
e
t
i
m
e


=0.9
=0.6
=0.4
=0.1
Fig. 2. Network lifetime and distortion robustness tradeoff for different
values of . Parameter = 0.1 is used.
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
0.06
0.08
0.1
0.12
0.14
0.16
0.18
0.2
0.22
0.24
Distortion Robustness 1
F
l
o
w
f
1
(
M
b
p
s
)


=0.8
=0.6
=0.4
=0.2
Fig. 3. Optimal ow utilization and distortion robustness tradeoff for
different values of .
dened as

s

p(s)
f
p
s
, varies as a function of ow-
distortion threshold. Network decision for optimal ow alloca-
tion is based on the required video quality, while minimizing
the nodal power consumption to achieve optimal lifetime
performance. It is observed that when the required video
quality degrades there is a gradual decrease in the network
utilization. This is due to the fact that while maintaining
lifetime and the video quality, network optimally adjusts the
trafc rate of the encoder thus controlling the allocation of the
ow rates.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we propose an efcient multimedia deliv-
ery framework for battery limited handheld devices, while
satisfying video quality and bandwidth utilization. For this
purpose, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated
achieving an optimal tradeoff between network utilization, life-
time and distortion. For optimal video quality, an appropriate
objective function for distortion margin is calculated using
sensitivity analysis, which helps in attaining desired level of
20 30 40 50 60 70 80
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
0.5
0.55
0.6
D
(th)
N
e
t
w
o
r
k
U
t
i
l
i
z
a
t
i
o
n
(
M
b
p
s
)


=0.8
=0.6
=0.4
=0.2
Fig. 4. Network utilization performance as a function of distortion threshold
D
th
for different values of beta. Parameter = 0.1 is used.
distortion instead of meeting maximum distortion threshold.
The distributed implementation of the proposed framework is
achieved by using the duality theory. Performance evaluation
results provide an insight of power-minimized rate allocation
in order to achieve the maximum network lifetime while
maintaining the desired video quality.
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